I forgot to mention, I had logged out after each attempt. However, today after booting up again, it now shows tty in groups. BUT....., now I only have:

roland tty floppy audio video cdrom

One of the commands must have screwed up my original groups! That explains why I couldn't shutdown as regular user yesterday! Good thing I posted my original groups on here, now at least I know which ones to add back. After thinking about it, one of the commands worked to add my user to the tty group (after logging out & in), but the "groups" command must not have updated until I rebooted.

So, anyway, which was the proper command to add a user to a group without screwing up the existing groups?